Communication Strategy: How to Create One That Works

Before your company jumps in head first with an ill-planned communication strategy, take into consideration that to be successful you need to not only hone your message, but know how you plan to deliver it.

When developing your communication strategy, your message needs to walk the fine line between offering your targets too much data, which will only cause confusion, and not enough content, which only weakens your position.

At the same time, even if you have the perfect message, but neglect to reach those most likely to make a purchase because you were unsuccessful at identifying the best way of communicating with your target audience, then every campaign you run is destined to fail.

Here are four basic steps to developing a working communication strategy:

Define your targets

Your target prospects are simply the group of individuals that you want to buy into your product or service. The value in identifying your businesses target audience comes when you begin to work on your marketing message. It will also dictate how you will deliver specific messages to your different market segments.

When learning how to identify your target market, most new professionals can benefit from answering a few simple questions. Who is your audience? What motivates them? What do they need from you?

Determine your corporate message

The heart of any successful communication strategy is the message. A powerful message will promote a company into the place where it wants to position itself within its industry. It does so by creating value that is relayed to the consumer.

Each of your identified targets will get their own version or messaging strategy based on several factors. When determining these factors it is important to continue to ask yourself questions like, what benefits are we relaying? Are we clearly stating these benefits to the appropriate targets? Is our message being received by our initial test markets?

In addition, when you are developing your corporate message you will want to be sure that it is not only tailored to your target prospects needs and wants, but also that it clearly brands you as the source of this valuable and action inspiring correspondence.

Reaching your target market

If you are not developing a communication strategy that has been designed to reach out and grab as many targeted prospects as possible, then you are missing the point. You have enough market research resources available to you to pin point the section of the general population that will most likely want and or need your product or service.

You will also be able to use these same tools as a way of determining if you are targeting a segment of the market that is too small or too focused to be profitable and which channels of communication are best to reach your key demographic.

For example, running your keywords through Google’s AdWord’s tool will tell you how many people searched for those words locally and globally. If you find that those searches are sufficiently over a million searches you can use something like the Facebook Ad tool to see how many users have listed your keywords in their profiles as interests.

You now have the ability to run targeted ads to targeted individuals and you know there is a sufficient amount of activity taking place each month.

Also, do not neglect the single most effective and cost efficient marketing tools you have available to you, email. When done correctly, email can build brand awareness, drive traffic, and boost direct sales all while becoming the cornerstone of your entire communications strategy.

As a general rule when deciding on whether to go a traditional route with your message, a digital route, or the preferred combination of the two, ask yourself, what are the benefits of delivering our message this way? What are the disadvantages?

Is your communication strategy working?

Finally, you need to put into place measures that allow you to identify whether or not your communication strategy is working.

What this process should do is give you clear indicators of what is working and what needs to be improved upon. While this final element is crucial, it is also important to continue to research what is working for others and what others have done that has failed.

Ask yourself, are we gathering enough information about our campaigns to determine if we are being successful in our campaigning?

In this constant desire to research and improve your communication strategy is the key to its success. Your strategy needs to evolve and grow as your company does. To discover the secrets of how the world’s fastest growing companies got their millions of users, you need to have your ear to the ground of your industry.

Are there any tips or tricks that you have used in your business to communicate with your target market? What is the communication strategy that has worked best for you? Feel free to subscribe and let us know your tips in the comment section below.